The actor Alan Bennion has died at the age of 88.

Alan Bennion appeared in 13 episodes of Doctor Who, playing Ice Lords in three serials featuring the Ice Warriors.

He first played Slaar, the leader of the Ice Warriors in the 1969 second Doctor story The Seeds of Death. He returned to the series in 1972 playing Izlyr, the Ice Warrior delegate to Peladon alongside the third Doctor, in The Curse of Peladon. His final appearance as a martian came in 1974 when he played Azaxyr. the leader of the Galactic Federation troops, sent to Peladon in the story The Monster of Peladon

Other television roles included playing The Scorpion in Sexton Blake, the Magistrate in Oliver Twist and Ted Williams in Juliet Bravo. He appeared in A Family at War, Z Cars, The Gentle Touch and Sorry!.

The actor Leslie Grantham has died at the age of 71.

Leslie Grantham had a small role in the 1984 story Resurrection of the Daleks playing Kiston, a member of Lytton's mercenary company. He will be best remembered for creating the role of Den Watts in the hugely successful soap opera EastEnders.

Born in Camberwell, south London, after leaving school, Grantham joined the Royal Fusiliers becoming a lance corporal. He was 18 when serving in Germany he bungled a robbery. During a struggle, he shot and killed a taxi driver, Felix Reese. Grantham insisted he did not know the gun was loaded and it had gone off by accident. The jury didn't believe him and convicted him of murder.

The next 11 years were spent in British jails. It was while serving in Leyhill Prison in Gloucestershire that he met actress Louise Jameson, who was working as a prison visitor. She encouraged him to take up acting and on his release, he was offered a place at drama school

Leslie Grantham's big break came in 1984 when he was offered the role of the pub landlord in the BBC's new gritty drama, EastEnders, set in the working class area of East London. The director of the show's first episode, Matthew Robinson, had also helmed his appearance in Doctor Who.

His was the first voice heard in the show. The character was immoral, unscrupulous and cruel and it gripped the imagination of the British public. When the character made his daughters schoolgirl friend pregnant he was dubbed Dirty Den by the tabloids.

The Christmas 1986 episode, in which Den handed divorce papers to his wife Angie, was watched by 30 million viewers, half the population of the UK.

Grantham left the series in 1989. Other roles followed but he never achieved the success enjoyed while in EastEnders. He was lured back in 2003 for an 18 month stint.

Grantham has lived in Bulgaria for the last few years. He recently retured to the UK for medical treatment He died on Friday morning

He is survived by his three children, Michael (“Spike”), Jake and Danny

The Doctor Who spin-off Class, created by Young Adult author Patrick Ness is returning in six new audio plays from Big Finish Productions.

The series, released in August 2018, will feature six new adventures from the world of Coal Hill Academy.

Class was created by the BBC to appeal to the young adult market and initially released in the UK on the BBC Three online platform. However the series struggled to make an impact and when it was later screened on BBC One, it failed to find an audience, getting viewing figures around a third of the timeslot average. After one season the series was cancelled by the BBC.

Big Finish is now reviving the series on audio with six new adventures made in arrangement with BBC Studios.

Set during the television series, the new version features the original cast. Greg Austin plays Charlie Smith, Fady Elsayed plays Ram Singh, Sophie Hopkins plays April MacLean, Vivian Oparah plays Tanya Adeola, Jordan Renzo plays Matteusz Andrzejewski and Katherine Kelly plays Miss Andrea Quill.



The series will also see Seventh Doctor companion Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, return to Coal Hill in an adventure following up her previous skirmish with the Daleks in the Doctor Who television episode, Remembrance of the Daleks.

Director and Producer Scott Handcock says Nicholas Briggs, executive producer says Class is available for pre-order now at £23 on CD or £18 on download from the Big Finish site and will remain at this price until general release when it will be available for £25 on CD or £20 on download.

Social video service Twitch has today announced that over 500 classic episodes of Doctor Who will air worldwide from May 29 to July 23

Twitch is joining forces with BBC Studios for the first-ever digital broadcasting event of the Classic Doctor Who era. Over 500 episodes from 26 seasons dating from the show’s inception in 1963 until the 1980s will air worldwide over a seven-week period. Starting May 29, fans can tune in each week Monday to Friday at 11 am PDT to catch episodes on Twitch.tv/TwitchPresents.

Nick Coulter, Director of Digital Sales and Business Development at BBC Studios says: Doctor Who is the latest in over a dozen TV shows that have aired on Twitch. Viewers who Subscribe to the TwitchPresents channel will gain access to 14 exclusive emotes themed after each of the first seven doctors.

For Doctor Who fans in the US, UK, and Canada, Twitch is hosting a giveaway each week of the event, including a grand prize trip to London Comic Con in Fall 2018.

As part of the event, leading UK digital content creators The Yogscast are producing a series of shows that will introduce each Doctor. With a cast of Doctor Who screenwriters, experts, fans, and even a former companion, the Yogscast's Turps and resident Doctor Who expert and High Roller's player Matt Toffollo will be discussing why modern audiences should be watching Doctor Who. Each 20-minute episode will provide a brief summary of the stories that are about to be shown, including the actors, monsters, famous phrases or production gaffes to look out for. With first-hand knowledge from former companion Katy Manning (who played Jo Grant the Third Doctor Companion) and writers Bob Baker and Paul Cornell, the shows will give insight into the series alongside the humor and irreverence viewers expect from the Yogscast.

Jane Weedon, Director of Business Development at Twitch said For more information on the Doctor Who episodes that will air on Twitch, visit the Twitch blog.

Doctor Who on Twitch

Graham Strong, the man responsible for the survival of many high-quality audio recordings of missing Doctor Who episodes, has died at the age of 69.

Graham Strong was a 14-year-old schoolboy when Doctor Who began in 1963. A keen electronics student, his hobby included building valve and transistor radios, as well as repairing televisions for neighbours. He was the proud owner of a second-hand Reel to reel tape machine and decided to use this to preserve the audio of this exciting new serial.

Following The Daleks' Master Plan, episode 7, Strong, used his electronics knowledge to wire the audio output from the television into the Tape recorder. A highly dangerous procedure that breaks every rule of electrical safety but one that resulted in recordings that were crystal clear.

Strong was one of a small number of early fans who recorded audio from the now missing stories. However, he is believed to be the only one to record directly from the Television, resulting in the superior quality of his recordings.

In 1994 an accidental meeting with a Doctor Who fan who had contacts in the BBC brought his collection to the attention of the corporation. By this time the master tapes of most early episodes had been junked and the episodes were either missing or only existed as film prints. After reassurance that his tapes would be carefully cared for, Strong handed over recordings containing over 100 Doctor Who episodes.

Strong's recordings have been used for the animated releases of missing episodes such as Power of the Daleks. His recordings are so clear that they often exceed the quality available on the surviving film prints of the episodes, and as a result, a number of DVD's of early episodes contain audio taken from Strong's recordings rather than the film print.

Canadian fans will be able to join the US in seeing the "director's cut" of Genesis of the Daleks in Cineplex cinemas on the 14th June.


For full details on where the story can be seen see the Cineplex website.

The latest release from The Black Archive series of books looks at the 1964 Doctor Who story Marco Polo

Marco Polo was broadcast during an era of cultural change, reshaping television’s role as historian, and locating the reader, not the author, at the centre of interpretation. This is crucial given how the fourth serial recruits the viewer as a fellow traveller in Marco’s caravan.

The epic journey is staged through camera-treatments and mobility, adaptive and remedial interventions, public and book history, cultural assumptions and memories. Rather than the solitary authorial figure of Marco, this book celebrates the collaborators, copyists, studio personnel and fans, whose community storytelling is in the philosophical spirit of Doctor Who.

Dene October is editor of Doctor Who and History and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts, London. He is in the possibly unique position of having seen Marco Polo not once, but twice, on broadcast.

October investigates several threads while keeping to the rhythm of the travelogue, exploiting how the exhaustive televisual experience inverts the trope of time travel. His book is itself a wayfaring reflection on how we travel through media and memory in reconstructing this most famous and earliest of missing stories. Black Archive #18: Marco Polo is released on 7th April 2018 and can be ordered from Obverse Books.

Fantom Publishing is releasing two new Commentaries in their WhoTalk series.

The series beings cast a crew together to provide an alternative commentary to the officially released Doctor Who stories.

The first two, of what is promised to be a bumper year of releases, come from either end of the original series.

Producer Paul W T Ballard explains The second release this month is the serial which ended the show’s twenty-six year run on television. There are two complete commentaries for the story included on the release. These CDs are very limited, and exclusively available via whotalk.co.uk

Both sets are now available, you can purchase directly direct from Who Talk at a discounted price of £10.99 each (RRP £12.99) or via download priced £9.99. The special edition bundle will be available exclusively via the website priced £39.99.

Please note: These commentaries contain no BBC copyrighted elements and do not feature any audio from the episodes themselves.

Graham Strong, the man responsible for the survival of many high-quality audio recordings, from missing Doctor Who episodes, has donated his collection to Mark Ayres of the Doctor Who Restoration Team, in order to be properly archived.

Strong started recording the audio from the series when he was just 14, using a domestic reel to reel, quarter-inch, tape recorder, the only way of preserving audio recordings at the time. The first recordings were made via a basic crystal microphone, hanging over the television speaker with a plant pot placed on the top of the T.V. to keep the microphone in place.

Following The Daleks' Master Plan, episode 7, Strong, a keen electronics student, managed to wire the audio input into the Tape recorder, directly to the audio output of the Television set. A highly dangerous procedure that breaks every rule of electrical safety but one that resulted in recordings that were crystal clear.

In fact, the surviving recordings are so clear that they often exceed the quality available on the surviving film prints of the episodes, and as a result, a number of DVD's of early episodes contain audio taken from Strong's recordings rather than the film print.

Strong was one of a small number of early fans who recorded audio from the now missing stories. However, he is believed to be the only one to record directly from the Television, resulting in the superior quality of his recordings.

Makeup Designer Dorka Nieradzik has died at the age of 68.

Dorka Nieradzik worked on thirty episodes of Doctor Who, covering nine stories between 1980 and 1988.

Her first story was as Makeup Artist on the Fourth Doctor story The Leisure Hive. One of her first tasks was to age the leading actor, Tom Baker, using a mixture of makeup, prosthetics, and hairpieces. She then covered the final Fourth story, Logopolis, designing the Watcher, the ghostly apparition that helped the Doctor regenerate.

For the Fifth Doctor, she worked on the stories Four To Doomsday and Time-Flight, turning renowned actor Stratford Johns into a large frog-like creature as well as disguising Anthony Ainley's Master as the alien Kalid.

She designed the Makeup for three Sixth Doctor stories, Vengeance on Varos, Revelation of the Daleks and Mindwarp, presiding over the demise of the companion Peri, before working on two Seventh Doctor stories, The Happiness Patrol and Silver Nemesis.

Dorka Nieradzik was born on March 5, 1949 in Tarnowskie Góry, Silesia, Poland as Dorka Dorota Malgorzata Nieradzik, moving to Scotland, the home of her mother, at an early age. She began her career in the theatre working as a wardrobe assistant before winning a place as a BBC Makeup training course.

At the BBC she worked on most genres of programme, with credits as diverse as Last of the Summer Wine and Top of the Pops, EastEnders and Only Fools and Horses...., Yes Minister and the Dennis Potter drama's Cold Lazarus and Karaoke.

She later worked on the feature films Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Duplicity, The Boys Are Back and Shoot 'Em Up as the personal stylist for the actor Clive Owen.

She won a Bafta award in 1995 for Makeup on Cold Comfort Farm and in 2000 was honoured her with a special BAFTA award for her contribution to the industry. In 2004 she was made MBE for services to drama.

Dorka Nieradzik died on 12 February 2018. She is survived by her father, her sister Anushia, and brother, David,